John Baldessari’s work, like the ideology of post-Modernism itself, has been closely linked to post-Structuralist philosophy. Baldessari, like many of the conceptual clones he has helped spawn, dutifully questions the language of representation and lays bare the concealed structures of signification that constitute the received information of the popular media.

Over the past ten years, this strategy has evolved into a familiar, in many cases clichéd, statement of the obvious. In lesser hands, the paean to the open text—with its dangling signifiers, deconstructed rhetoric, and debunking of the